by Nicolas Mahler, La Pastèque

An art book is not really what you want from Nicolas Mahler. You don’t want it because you know it will be shitty.

Mahler is one of my favorite European cartoonists, but his deliberately artless, subdoodle drawing style is hardly something to seek esthetic value in. In most of his work, the art is purely functional, carrying a narrative but attempting nothing else except maybe to be unpretentious or possibly charming. What I’m trying to say is that Mahler doesn’t draw very well.

But Shitty Art Book is not really an art book, in the sense that it showcases art. It’s a strange little book, featuring disconnected pictures of an unnamed schlub character with dryly sardonic text, in English and French. The text is positioned like a caption in a gag comic, but there is no gag; rather the text is somewhere between straight narrative and a nonsequitor: “His only hobby was not knowing the difference between right and wrong,” reads one typical example. Other text may inform us that the protagonist shops, gets dizzy, or loses his shopping bag. The overall effect is as bleak and pathetic as a Chris Ware “Tales of Tomorrow” page, but without the contrast between the possibility and actuality. Mahler’s character is just statically pathetic.

For there is no story here. Most of the pages and text could be shuffled around in any order. And most of the pictures add nothing to the text. The caption “There were things bigger than him. A lot bigger. Those things were huge” is wry, and fairly amusing, but it is scarcely made more amusing by an accompanying picture of a poorly drawn man gazing at a distant, poorly drawn building.

The resulting book is a curiosity. It’s certainly interesting, but it’s also 100 words of text with bad drawings. You probably won’t regret reading it, but you may well regret buying it.

Shitty Art Book does have one real joke, in the ostensible paratext before the first page: the claim that the book is a signed and numbered limited edition of 1000, and this copy is number one. It also says there: “This shitty book is art.”